Theatine Church (Theatinerkirche)

The Theatine Church, or Theatinerkirche St. Kajetan, is a glowing yellow church with black accents just across from The Residenz. Royal Ferdinand built it in 1662 as an honor and thanks because his wife produced an heir to the Bavarian Crown. Most men would have just brought a bouquet of flowers and her favorite chocolates, but I’m glad he was a man of the grand gesture.

Like I mentioned before, it has an all-white interior in stucco, with the exception of some side chapel pictures and a great black wooden pulpit. I’ve seen many many churches in my travels with Dave, so the churches that keep my attention are the interesting, unusual churches. This one qualifies with its yellow exterior (with black details on the towers) and the nearly all-white interior. Most of these pictures below are taken on Monday just before we headed down into the U-Bahn. We were drawn in because the sun was really shining brightly, more so than the day before.

We took many photographs, so just scroll through them at your own speed. Don’t worry, I didn’t put them all up, just enough to give you an idea.

I think the putti is where the sense of humor resides in this church. Much of religious decoration can be so somber, but not these little cherubs. A couple of them are playing hide and seek, with the leaves from the vine over their faces.

I searched in vain for more information about this memorial, but all I could find was that it was for Princess Maximiliane Caroline, born 21 July 1810 in Nymphenburg (a local palace on the outskirts of Munich) who died on the 4th of February 1821 in Munich. Some say she took ill after viewing a theater performance.Her parents were Maximilian I Joseph, King of Bavaria and Karoline, Princess von Baden and the child’s nickname was “Ni.” All of this information has different spellings in different places, but the salient fact was the young princess was eleven and judging from the carving above, her mother was heartbroken.